Uncovering Race A Black Journalist's Story of Reporting and Reinvention

A Black Journalist's Story of Race, Media, and Reinvention A veteran reporter confronts her industry's refusal to represent and reflect a soon-to-be "majority-minority" nation From the Rodney King riots to the racial upheaval that gripped Boston's most prestigious newspaper in the late 1990s, the stories Amy Alexander chronicled were the biggest of American journalism's modern era. Begun in the bare-knuckled newsrooms of 1980s San Francisco, her career spans a period of industry-wide economic collapse and epic national demographic changes. Behind the bylines, Alexander confronted a familiar challenge to working women: balancing her career with marriage and family. Minority Opinionoffers trenchant analysis of how race, gender, and class come to bear on newsrooms, and takes aim at mainstream media's failure to successfully cover a browner, younger nationa failure that Alexander argues is speeding news organizations' demise faster than the Internet.

Amy Alexander is an award-winning content producer. The 2008 Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Nation Institute, she has contributed to many prominent publications, including the Miami Herald, Boston Globe, Village Voice, Washington Post, and the Nation. She has also written for Salon.com and TheRoot.com, and was associate producer of NPR’s Tell Me More, with Michel Martin. Her three previous books include Lay My Burden Down, coauthored with Alvin Poussaint, MD. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.